Reexamining the Inflation Humbug

Old theories die hard. It's not money creation that causes inflation. It's because merchants have to raise prices to cover costs, the result of "a radical (currency) devaluation" stemming usually from it being manipulated by its floating exchange rate.

Case in point - post-Soviet Russia's ruble collapse. It had nothing to do with rampant money creation. As F. William Engdahl explained in his Century of War:

In 1993 - 1994, it was even worse for Yugoslavia and Ukraine, by some estimates an even greater hyperinflation than in Weimar Germany. Again the textbook explanation was rubbish.

Yugoslavia collapsed because the IMF "prevented the government from obtaining the credit it needed from its own central bank." Unable to create money and issue credit, social programs couldn't be financed or the provinces kept in place as one country.

Yugoslavia's problem was its success under a mixed free-market socialist model that threatened Western capitalism once the Soviet Union disbanded. It was feared that other former republics would emulate it, free from IMF shock therapy. As a result, the country had to be dismembered and its model destroyed, especially because of its strategic location - its "critical path" to potential Central Asian oil and gas.

In the 1980s, its imports exceeded exports, and it borrowed huge foreign sums for unprofitable factories. With too few dollars for repayment, IMF debt relief was requested under its usual terms. The result was 20% unemployment after 1100 companies went bankrupt. Worse still, inflation rose dramatically to over 150% in 1991. With still too little money to retain the provinces, "economic chaos followed causing each (one) to fight for its own survival" lasting a decade and causing tens of thousands of deaths and destruction.

Washington-imposed policies made it worse - a total embargo causing hyperinflation and 70% unemployment while blaming it on Milosevic. Ukraine met the same fate the result of IMF diktats. The currency collapsed, inflation soared, and state industries unable to get credit went bankrupt - as planned.

It's an ugly scheme to let Western predators buy assets on the cheap. Once Europe's breadbasket, Ukraine was reduced to begging the US for food aid, which then dumped its excess grain on the country, further exacerbating its self-sufficiency. Predatory capitalism is ruthless. This is how it works with bankers in the lead role.

Argentina is another example - "swallowed (by) the same debt monster" as the others. In the late 1980s, inflation rose 5000 percent, but money creation had nothing to do with it.

Post-WW II, the country was troubled by inflation, but it wasn't critical until after Juan Peron's 1974 death. Over the next eight years, it increased seven-fold to 206 percent - not by printing pesos but by radically devaluing the currency combined with a 175 percent rise in oil prices. One source said it was done intentionally to benefit exporters, speculators, and capitalists to prove free-market policies work best.

Nonetheless, high inflation and speculation became "hallmark(s) of Argentine financial life," the result of disastrous government policies. Even worse was that Argentina was "targeted by international lenders for massive petrodollar loans." When interest rates rocketed in the 1980s, repayment became impossible, and obtaining concessions came at the expense of IMF demands.

In the 1990s, they were implemented. The peso was pegged to the dollar. Currency devaluations ceased. The country lost its international competitiveness. The "money supply was fixed, limited and inflexible," and as a result national bankruptcies occurred in 1995 and again in 2001, but government reaction wasn't as expected. Argentina defied its creditors, defaulted on its debt, and began its road to recovery - with no foreign help or intervention. Post-2001, the economy grew by 8% for two successive years. Exports increased. The currency stabilized. Investors returned. The IMF was paid off, and unemployment eased.

Numerous other examples are similar. Professor Henry CK Liu calls foreign capital a "financial narcotic that would make the (19th century) Opium War(s) look like a minor scrimmage." In the late 1990s, Asian Tiger economies got a taste.

America's Economic War on Asia

Today's Japan evolved out of its feudal past once a modern central government was formed. Its 20th century economic model "has been called 'a state-guided market system.' The (government) determines the priorities and commissions the work, then hires private enterprise to carry it out."

America's military-industrial complex resembles it, but differs in one major respect. Post-WW II, Japan developed its economy without war. America practically worships it to the detriment of everyone at home and abroad.

At the end of the 1980s, "Japan was regarded as the leading economic and banking power in the world," and thus a challenge to US supremacy as the country that could say no. Its model was so successful that Asian "Tiger" economies copied it - in South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, and elsewhere. Washington determined to undercut them as early as the 1985 James Baker-engineered Plaza accord and Baker-Miyazawa agreement.

He got Toyko to exercise monetary and fiscal measures to expand domestic demand and reduce Japan's trade surplus. At the same time, the Bank of Japan cut interest rates to 2.5% in 1987 and held that level until May, 1989. The idea was for lower rates to stimulate US goods purchases, but instead, cheap money went into Japanese stocks and real estate fueling two colossal bubbles.

The yen was also affected. Within months, it shot up 40% against the dollar, and overnight Japan became the world's largest banking center. At its twin bubble peaks, Tokyo real estate (in dollars) exceeded all of America's and its stock market represented 42% of world valuations - but not for long.

In 1990, Japan proposed financing former Soviet republics on its model and drew strong US opposition for two reasons. It might exclude US companies, and it would rely on the successful model that fueled Japanese and Asian Tiger growth. It had to be stopped and was.

Pressure was applied with threats of drastic US troop cuts that might endanger Japan's security. The scheme was drop your economic plans or defend yourself. At the same time, the country's twin bubbles imploded, and within months its Nikkei index lost $5 trillion in value, the result of predatory Wall Street short selling intervention. It left Japan severely hurt and no longer a challenge to America.

Confronting Asia's Tiger economies came next. In a Century of War, F. William Engdahl explained:

Hedge fund predators like George Soros took full advantage, attacking the weakest regional economy and its currency - Thailand and its baht. The aim: forced devaluation, and it worked. Thailand floated its currency and needed first-time ever IMF help.

Next came the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Korea with much the same result and fallout. Prosperous Asian Tigers were forced into IMF debt bondage as their populations sank into economic chaos and mass poverty, the result of a liquidity crisis severe enough to plunge the region into depression. Within months, over $100 billion shifted to private hands, and within a year $600 billion in stock market valuations were lost.

East Asia was effectively looted. Real earnings plummeted. Unemployment soared with the International Labor Organization estimating around 24 million lost jobs along with the region's remarkable miracle - its prosperous middle class. People literally were thrown overboard - small farmers and business owners, unions, and millions of ordinary people made human wreckage, the result of Wall Street-designed predation, the same scheme wrecking havoc today on a global scale.

China Awakens and Prospers

Under Deng Xiaoping, China changed from a centrally-planned economy to its own market-based model under government-owned banks able to issue credit for domestic development. Until the global economic crisis emerged, it grew impressively at double-digit rates.

Key is its banking system, its government-issued currency, and a system of state-owned banks. Henry CK Liu distinguishes between "national" and "central" banks - the former serves the national and public interest; the latter, private international finance at the expense of the nation and people.

In 1995, China's Central Bank Law gave the People's Bank of China (PBoC) central bank status, but more in name than form in that it still follows government policies by directing money for internal development, not bank profits. In addition, China is debt free and thus unemcumbered by IMF mandates and predatory banking cartel interests. It also protected its currency by refusing to let it float (beyond a minor adjustment) and be vulnerable to speculative predators.

The proof is in the results. China's independent monetary policy works, much like colonial America, government under Lincoln, and Nazi Germany under Hitler. They printed their own money, debt free, and prospered - impossible under today's American model of indebtedness to predatory bankers.

Even worse are New World Order and WTO rules for a global government run by powerful international bankers and corporations - "oppressing the public through military means and restricting individual freedoms." Financial terrorism as well by shifting wealth hugely to the top at the expense of beneficial social change to be abandoned.

A follow-up article focuses on America captured in a "web of debt."

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